Thursday, April 15, 2010

The Improbable Cabinet

It started a few months ago when I stumbled across an Art Deco bedroom suite being given away on Craigslist. Three matching pieces -- tall bureau, wide bureau, and vanity table with mirror and upholstered bench in genuine Waterfall style from the '30s with nice inlay work and mmm, those voluptuous rounded corners -- everything in reasonable shape, especially for the price. And right around the corner from me. Went and got them.

The tall bureau fit nicely in the bedroom and immediately found full employment there. There was temporarily no room for the wide bureau, so it went into the living room until we could move some things around in the bedroom. The vanity got sent to our friend Mike's for a few minor repairs. 

Right away, I became very fond of the wide bureau (below). Both bureaus have immensely capacious drawers, and lots of them. I have a fetish for candlelight, and that means I tend to collect every size and shape of candle imaginable. Needing easy access on a daily basis, I used one of the drawers in the wide bureau to store them all. Then my collection of tablecloths, runners, placemats, and napkins needed a home, and lo! it found one, and a nice one, in another of the bureau's bottomless drawers.

But time marches on. It became necessary to think of moving the wide bureau into the bedroom, which meant I would soon have to give up the candle and table linen storage it had been so graciously providing in the living room. I began to wonder what would replace it when it had gone. The space it occupies is relatively large and could accommodate another piece of furniture that was both tall and wide. We have a tremendous number of books in storage, and I wouldn't mind a few display shelves for all the various bird figurines, models, carvings, etc., that have managed to fly into my life during the past few years...
 
Thus it began -- the search for the Improbable Cabinet.

I started by looking at furniture that already existed, that was (theoretically) readily available in one form or another.

There were a number of non-negotiable features necessary for my imaginary piece of furniture -- it required at least two drawers, for starters; then it had to have several shelves for books (which meant that the piece would have to be deep enough to hold something larger than a paperback, at least on one side), and a glass front of some sort for showing off the tchotchkes. Then, it needed to match the primary wood tone of the rest of the furniture in the living room, which is essentially dark brown, with undertones of red and a little black. No blonde jokes around here.

The style was also important. While somewhat eclectic, our taste, at least in the living room, hovers somewhere among the Aesthetic Movement, Stickley/Mission, and the faintly exotic -- carving, quarter-sawing, stained glass, thick area rugs, brocades, and portieres. Anything that looked as if it had been made later than about 1915 would stick out like a sore thumb.

Infinitely complicating matters was my budget. Despite our pseudo-Gold Coast style of decor, I spend surprisingly little on interior decorating, instead relying heavily on curbside scavenging, Craigslist's "free" ads, building or reconstructing pieces from salvaged materials, and (gulp) even resorting to Ikea on occasion. Occasionally I have sprung for something I really wanted that I couldn't get any other way, but trust me, those instances were very rare. Most of the time we've just been too broke. No point investing in nice furniture when you can't afford to pay the rent.

So, my fond hope was to find the perfect piece, or at least the materials for it, cheap or for free. Those who have dismissed me as an incurable pessimist -- admit it, you were wrong all along.

First I went to Craigslist, my go-to and fallback for quixotic decorating projects. Over a period of days I haunted the "free" ads both on Long Island and in the general NYC area. As is generally the case when I'm desperately seeking a specific item for free, there wasn't one damn thing worth looking at twice. Nuts.

Moving on to the ads for "antiques" (and I do use the term loosely), I found all sorts of interesting things. Usually they were too expensive, too far away, the wrong color, or all three. But what a great time I had looking!

This (right), for instance, was for sale somewhere in New Jersey.


It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but it was certainly the right color and style. Unfortunately, while cheap (under $500), it still wasn't in my price range. Had it been free, and had it not required the payment of several bridge tolls to acquire, I'm sure I'd have grabbed it. As it was, the asking price was too high, and the prospect of borrowing a vehicle to collect it made me all too aware of the fact that it really wasn't large enough to hold books. Fugeddaboudit.

As I continued my perusal of the multitude of case pieces available under the Craigslist "antiques" rubric, I began to realize that the item I sought could be known by many names -- a secretary (which is how the double, glass-doored, shelved New Jersey wonder had been advertised, although it had no desk area to speak of), a bookcase (with or without wooden or glass doors), an armoire, a vitrine...

I was mulling over these semantic and nomenclatural subtleties when this beauty (below) hove into sight.


Eric came running into the living room from outside when he heard me screaming in my seat at the computer. "What's the matter? Are you OK?" he asked worriedly. I was moaning -- in ecstasy, as it turned out, although you really couldn't blame him for thinking I was in the throes of a coronary.

"OGodOGodOGod!" I kept mumbling -- very appropriately, as it turned out: the piece in question had apparently been rescued from the vestibule of a church. However, like many another romantic fantasy, this one simply wasn't meant to be. The asking price was eight hundred smackers, and it was located way out in the wilds of Connecticut. Besides, it was far too light in hue to mingle discreetly with the high-toned pieces in our living room, and in addition, it didn't have a clear glass door for display.  On closer inspection, I began to wonder whether it wasn't a cheap pine piece cobbled together from scrap wood and mass-produced stained glass made in a Chinese prison camp -- a sham, a counterfeit, a humbug. When I looked at it with the cool, objective eye of a millionaire who could afford to buy anything she chose, it was actually pretty darn ugly. The sellers were lunatics to think anyone would pay eight hundred bucks for something that was such an obvious piece of junk, and fraudulent to boot.

Sour grapes.

Several days later, I had found nothing at all that I could afford and/or was suitable. In desperation I had gone to more websites than I liked to remember, sliding lower and lower, passing from antiques (real or imagined, but at least advertised as such) to reproductions, at last descending into the netherworld of knockdown: "Assembly Required" nightmares of MDF and melamine. On the website of a national web retailer I found this (left). 

Not bad looking, even though on closer inspection it wasn't really made of wood (just what, may I ask, is meant by "composite wood and fine veneers"?). Shipped knockdown, it was almost affordable. OK, so it didn't have two drawers, but the other dimensions, and the color, seemed to be sort of in the ballpark.

Then something possessed me to read the buyers' comments about the item. "The assembly locking cams broke everytime my husband tightened them-finally went to hardware store and bought new ones to replace all the ones sent.Assembled,the drawer stuck out 3/4 of an inch.My husband figured the guide holes were wrong and moved the drawer slides back the 3/4 of inch..." Another hapless purchaser complained that even a few lightweight books caused the shelves to buckle and collapse. The back was thin cardboard. The doors didn't line up. And so on.

Oh well.

So now what? Well, my surfing and fantasizing, while time consuming, weren't entirely unprofitable. I picked up a yellow legal pad and turned my subconscious loose, coming up with a facsimile of "The Improbable Cabinet"(above). No matter that it doesn't exist anywhere but in my fevered imagination, and that it never will. I may live in my living room, but it's really only a fantasy in three dimensions, after all. I will persevere, even though I can't draw and my friends all think I'm a lunatic. They laughed at Einstein too, you know.













Thursday, April 1, 2010

A Bizarre Relationship: Frank Zappa and My Ex

If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re familiar with Lionel Rolfe, co-publisher of Boryanabooks (with his lovely wife, the eponymous Boryana Rolfe). You’ve probably read his various musings on literature, politics, and classical music -- with a decided emphasis on “classical”. Coming as he does from a family of world-class classical musicians, Lionel has never been one to suffer rock ‘n roll fools gladly, nor find it in his heart to excuse the wretched excesses of popular culture. On the contrary: over the years, he has practically made a career out of thumbing his nose at pop icons of various stripes, from the Grateful Dead at their inception in ‘60s San Francisco to the advent of punk music in the ‘70s to whatever passing trend happened to be floating down the gutter in his artsy Silver Lake neighborhood a few minutes ago. He’s truly an egalitarian hater of anything with distorted guitars. Thus, being  married to me, a purveyor of music that involves abusing guitars on occasion, must have been a sore trial to him, especially when I insisted on introducing him to Frank Zappa.

Lionel and I first crossed paths in 1972 and married in 1975. (We separated in 1998.) By the time we met, I had briefly performed with Frank’s band, as well as contributing a couple of uncredited bits to his recordings. At that point my direct involvement in his music was over, but Frank and I remained friends, if a bit edgily. I still had a forlorn hope that Frank might see his way to produce my debut album, something we had previously discussed, although the odds of it actually happening were growing slimmer by the minute. At any rate, I was spending an inordinate amount of time at his band rehearsals, and one day Lionel decided to tag along and see what all the fuss was about.

Picture the scene: a cavernous, airplane hangarlike building (a former movie sound stage) on Sunset Boulevard near Bronson Avenue, where Frank and his musical minions toiled in a workmanlike fashion five days a week for several hours a day.  The band rehearsed on a raised stage in the middle of the enormous space. There were blazing spotlights and a mighty sound reinforcement system which replicated the ambience of a nightclub or small auditorium. Positioned dead center on the stage, haloed by the the main spot, was Frank’s chair, where he chain smoked Winstons, guzzled endless cups of 40-weight coffee from a Shop Vac-sized thermos pot, and generally tyrannized the musicians when he wasn’t standing up to play guitar.

Nearly anyone wandering into this rock ‘n roll purgatory would have found it intimidating, with its blinding lights, ear-splitting noise, and locker-room ambience, but not Lionel. As soon as we entered the building, he strode up to the stage without any invitation from me or anyone else. Looking boldly up toward Frank, he said “Hello, Mr. Zappa” in a challenging tone.

Frank glanced over at me with a sour expression, as if to ask “Who the f--- is this clown?”. I hastily introduced Lionel, at which Frank scowled. He apparently wasn’t in a good mood that day, and when he was in a bad mood he had the endearing habit of being extremely ungracious (to put it politely). “Yeah, well, pleased to meet you. Now have a seat if you wanna hang around. We have a lot to get through today,” he snapped. We skulked over to a couple of folding chairs in front of the stage and sat down without further badinage, but during the rehearsal, I caught Frank stealing glances at us out of the corner of his eye. He still wanted to know who the f--- the clown was.

During the break, Frank seemed a bit more relaxed, almost conciliatory about his earlier abrupt behavior towards us. We even chatted a bit. I mentioned that Lionel’s uncle was Yehudi Menuhin, the classical violinist, and Frank shot him an almost approving look. Then of course Lionel had to blurt out, “Nigey tells me you’ve written some orchestra stuff. So why do you play that thing?” -- indicating Frank’s electric guitar and amplifier stack.

Oh shit, I thought, and waited for the inevitable -- for Frank to make mincemeat out of Lionel. To my surprise, he merely shrugged. “Because when you want to drown out the orchestra, you need amplification,” he replied with a wry expression. I realized he was actually kind of enjoying being razzed, and was starting to relax when Lionel countered with, “Yeah, but what do you do when you have a power failure?”

“We get a generator,” Frank said curtly, as if Lionel were a total idiot. He then made a point of looking away from us, and began packing up his music charts. Clearly, we were dismissed.

Despite this decidedly inauspicious introduction, Lionel accompanied me to other rehearsals. Luckily, after Frank realized Lionel wasn’t likely to go away, he gradually began to accept him. They still engaged in rather spiky exchanges from time to time, but their repartee seemed good natured, at least on the surface.

At that point Frank had three African-American musicians in his employ, and a mutual rapport was soon very much in evidence among the three of them and Lionel. As anyone who knows Lionel will readily attest, he makes friends easily, probably because he’s always on the lookout for a good audience. During his coffeehouse days in the ‘60s, he had learned to shuck and jive with the best, and jazz musicians were among his favorite people. One afternoon I had to run an errand at Guitar Center a few blocks away on Sunset Boulevard, and I decided it was safe to leave Lionel at the rehearsal space for half an hour or so. The rehearsal was over for the day, but Lionel was hanging out with a couple of the guys, shooting the breeze and apparently having a good old time.

My errand achieved, I hastened back to the rehearsal space. I parked my car on the street and came around to the load-in area behind the building, where the entrance was. As I approached, a rather droll scene was unfolding.

The large van belonging to one of the black musicians was parked in the middle parking space with its rear doors flung open. A blue cloud and a characteristic botanical odor were wafting forth from the van’s interior, and lo and behold, there stood Frank glowering as only he could glower, and haranguing the van’s occupants -- the three musicians and Lionel, who’d been in there getting high. Frank, as is well known, never approved of drugs and had been known to fire musicians simply for smoking a little pot on the road. Fortunately no one got kicked off the gig, and if Frank did hold Lionel responsible for corrupting his employees, he never mentioned it.

Frank and I eventually had a major disagreement, and reached an impasse where neither of us wanted to speak to each other. This marked the end of  my relationship with him, as well as my visits to his rehearsals. After that, neither Lionel nor I had any contact with Frank until one day in 1985 when we were both working at the B’nai B’rith Messenger, the oldest Jewish weekly newspaper in Los Angeles (now defunct). Frank had gone on a highly public crusade against Tipper Gore and the PMRC over the censorship of lyrics on rock albums. At the Messenger we had a rather ditzy young intern who claimed to be a friend of Frank’s wife Gail, and one day she handed Lionel a letter addressed to him from Gail. The gist of this letter was, as far as Lionel could ascertain, that the PMRC was engaging in anti-Semitic tactics in the course of its campaign to persuade the public that rock lyrics needed to be censored -- an issue that would presumably interest Lionel as editor of the official newspaper of L.A.’s large and powerful Jewish community.

Of course Mrs. Zappa didn’t know just how disinterested Lionel was when it came to the subject of rock music. The Messenger was also a very conservative publication, and its publisher, an Orthodox rabbi, was even more disinterested in rock music than Lionel was. Every attempt was made by editor and publisher to evade the issue, in the hope it would just go away. But the intern kept reminding Lionel about the story until he finally got so tired of the subject that he told her she could write something about it. To nobody’s surprise, her resulting article required so much work that he finally had to rewrite it from beginning to end.

In the course of his editorial surgery, he realized he needed to call Frank and ask him some questions in an attempt to make sense of the whole business. When he did get Frank on the phone, the first thing Frank said was “Put Nigey on. I want to talk to her.” I wasn’t around when Lionel made the call, but after Frank answered Lionel’s questions, he invited us up to the house for dinner. He also chatted genially with Lionel, and repeated that he was looking forward to seeing us.

For various reasons, I didn’t want to see him at that point, so we never got back to him. Neither Lionel nor I ever saw him again. But when Frank died of prostate cancer eight years later, and I found myself feeling very upset about it, Lionel encouraged me to sit down and write about my relationship with him. That was how I wrote Being Frank: My Time with Frank Zappa, which Boryanabooks has now issued as an e-book. For a guy who has no use for rock ‘n roll, Lionel Rolfe has certainly had a lot to do with one of its most notorious perpetrators.

Please don’t hold it against him.